Brazil Natural Red Catuai - November Roaster's Choice
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Time to read 5 min
A Naturally Processed Brazilian Red Catuai Coffee
There are coffees that grab our attention because something about them is unusual. A rare cultivar. An experimental fermentation. A processing method with a name long enough to need its own paragraph.
This month’s Roaster’s Choice is interesting for almost the opposite reason.
Red Catuai is a familiar sight in Brazil. Natural processing is deeply established there. Even the flavors in this cup, with fig, caramel, and chocolate, feel comfortably at home in a Brazilian coffee.
This is a coffee from a very small piece of land in Pedralva, Minas Gerais, managed closely by Paulo Alexandre Fernandes and his wife, Débora. Its story stretches back more than fifty years, through devastating frosts, a family decision to keep trying, and eventually the division of a much larger farm into smaller plots that gave the next generation an opportunity to pay even closer attention to the coffee growing there.
Grower: Sítio do Balaio, Paul Alexandre Fernandes
Region: Pedralva Municipality, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Altitude: 1300 masl
Cultivar: Red Catuai
Process: Full Natural
Drying: Dried in the sun and in mechanical dryers
Harvest: May - September
Roast Level: Light
Roast Body: Mild
Cupping Notes: Fig, Salted Caramel, Tootsie Roll
A Coffee That Almost Wasn't
The Fernandes family arrived in Pedralva with something other than coffee in mind.
In 1974, family patriarch Mario Fernandes purchased land in the municipality with plans to raise livestock and grow sugarcane. Then frost swept through Brazil’s coffee growing regions, damaging crops and sending coffee prices higher. Mario saw the opportunity, and quickly pivoted.
He planted coffee, brought in his first harvest, and began building something new for his family. But only a few years later, another severe frost struck the area. After watching so much work disappear, walking away from coffee was a very real possibility, but his family encouraged him to try again.
They replanted, continued learning, and over the next three decades Sítio Fernandes grew into a working family coffee farm. What began as a response to one of the most difficult forces facing Brazilian coffee became something that would eventually involve multiple generations of the Fernandes family.
When Mario passed away in 2010, the land was divided among his children who wanted to continue growing coffee. On paper, that meant smaller farms. In practice, it created even more opportunity for Mario's family.
Smaller Farms Equals More Attention To Detail
Paulo Alexandre Fernandes now manages the portion of the original family property known as Sítio do Balaio with his wife, Débora.
The entire farm covers just 10 hectares, with approximately 4 hectares planted in coffee. By Brazilian coffee farm standards, it is remarkably small, but that scale changes the way the farm can be managed.
Harvesting is overseen by Paulo, while Débora manages drying. Coffee can be separated into smaller lots, watched more closely, and handled with the kind of attention that becomes increasingly difficult as production grows.
For the Fernandes family, dividing the original property did not mean abandoning what Mario built. It gave each part of the family room to refine it. That shift toward smaller plots and more precise management has helped the family pursue higher quality coffee while continuing to share the experience and infrastructure developed across generations.
Meticulous Natural Processing
This Red Catuai is fully Naturally processed.
In a Natural process, the coffee cherry is dried with the fruit still surrounding the seed. It sounds simple enough, but the quality of the final coffee depends heavily on what happens during that drying period.
The cherries need to be harvested at the right stage of ripeness. Drying needs to happen evenly. Moisture needs to leave the fruit at a controlled pace. Poor handling can easily show up later in the cup.
At Sítio do Balaio, that part of production falls largely under Débora’s watch.
The coffee is dried using both sun and mechanical drying before being stored on the farm. Because the fruit remains around the coffee during much of this process, a well managed Natural can develop considerable sweetness and body while still preserving the characteristics of the coffee underneath.
Red Catuai: A Brazilian Cultivar Worth Savoring
Red Catuai is widely associated with Brazilian coffee for good reason. It tends to produce balanced coffees with moderate acidity, approachable sweetness, and the chocolate and caramel characteristics many drinkers recognize immediately.
At Sítio do Balaio, it is growing around 1,300 meters above sea level in the municipality of Pedralva, which sits in southern Minas Gerais. Here is a landscape where elevation, cooler growing conditions, and generations of coffee knowledge have helped create a strong specialty coffee community.
This particular lot does not abandon the classic character of Brazilian Red Catuai. Instead, the combination of elevation, Natural processing, careful drying, and a light roast gives us a chance to see a little more of what is hiding inside it.
In The Cup
Our cupping notes for this coffee are Fig, Salted Caramel, and Tootsie Roll. And honestly, that combination tells the story of this coffee surprisingly well.
The fig brings a darker fruit sweetness rather than something bright or sharply acidic. There is a dense, almost jammy quality to it that works naturally with the coffee’s mild body. Then comes the salted caramel, bringing a richer cooked sugar sweetness and just enough contrast to keep the cup from feeling heavy.
The Tootsie Roll note lands squarely in familiar Brazilian chocolate territory, but with a particular candy like sweetness that makes it more specific than simply calling the coffee “chocolatey.”
Roasted light, those flavors have room to remain distinct. You still get the approachable sweetness and balance Red Catuai is known for, but without roasting away the fruit character that makes this particular lot interesting.
It is comfortable coffee, but by no means simple coffee.
How Do I Get This Coffee?
Part of the fun of Roaster’s Choice is finding coffees that give us something new to talk about each month.
Sometimes that means a wild processing experiment or an unexpected cultivar. Sometimes it means looking much more closely at something we think we already know.
Brazilian Natural Red Catuai is hardly unfamiliar territory in the coffee world. But this lot is a reminder that cultivar and process are only part of the equation. Who grows the coffee, where it grows, how closely it is harvested and dried, and the decisions made over generations all eventually find their way into the cup.
At Sítio do Balaio, Paulo and Débora are working on just four hectares of coffee that can trace its history back to a farm planted by Paulo’s father after a frost changed the family’s plans more than fifty years ago.
The farm became smaller along the way, but The attention to the coffee got bigger. And this month, we get to taste the result.
Order your Roaster's Choice subscription before November 5th, 2026, to experience Brazil Natural Red Catuai for yourself.
